The Pain Test - How doctors measure pain

Doctors have no idea how much their patients are suffering. That's about to change.

Ally Niemiec could have lost a kidney because doctors didn't believe she was in pain. It was last fall, and one of at least a dozen times that her rare kidney disease had sent her to the emergency room. She recognized the pain. She knew something was wrong.

But when she turned up in an Atlanta emergency room that Saturday afternoon, vomiting and doubled over, no one believed her. They looked at her pain medication records and decided she had a drug abuse problem.